Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  At Ballynahinch, one or two lighter moments occur in the classroom – as when someone is required to give the Irish word for ‘stomach’ (it is bolg), hesitates for a second and then comes out with ‘bulge’: a felicitous approximation. Art and English lessons here are tolerable – though the latter aren’t a patch on Miss Maire Casement’s at St Dominic’s, Miss Casement who once nearly caused me to fall off my chair when she berated the class for something or other: ‘You’re all a bunch of idlers and dunderheads,’ she cried; and then, after a pause, ‘Except for Patricia Craig.’ This has stayed in my mind since it’s the only time I remember being singled out for approval rather than censure. At Ballynahinch I’m not subjected to an extreme of either. I don’t make an impact on the school. I am threatened with being sent down to a lower form if my maths doesn’t improve, and praised for my parrot memory (being able to recite yards of verse) and slight flair for drawing.

  The year goes by. The lunchtime taunting fades away as that measly contingent in the form grows accustomed to me. I apply my wits to solving a major cause of distress: having to appear in public wearing black lisle stockings like the inmate of a bygone orphanage. It occurs to me quite early on that there’s nothing to stop me leaving the house in ordinary nylons, carrying the antiquated garments in my school case and somehow wriggling into them in the upstairs back seat of the Ballynahinch bus, suspenders and all – and reversing the process on the homeward journey. It works – with some unavoidable exposure of thighs and knickers. However, to begin with, the partial dressing and undressing procedure scandalises my fellow sixth-formers on the bus, one or two of whom threaten to report me to the nuns. I tell them to go ahead. They don’t actually go to these lengths, as it happens; and by the start of the spring term they’re all at it – changing into and out of their black uniform stockings on the top deck of the Ballynahinch bus. I account this my prime contribution to progress at the school. (Within a couple of years Ballynahinch has discarded black stockings or tights as part of its uniform and I have taken to wearing them. So the wheels of the outmoded/avant-garde go round and round.)

  The year goes by, and more and more I am conscious that a further year in this prison-house is too excruciating to contemplate. My moderate proficiency in the art class offers an escape route. I apply to, and am accepted by, the Belfast College of Art, then housed on the top floor of the massive College of Technology – a building dating from the early years of the twentieth century, which one would be sorry to see disappear from Belfast, even though it couldn’t be more unfortunately placed: right bang in front of the classical façade of Inst, whose full effect is consequently undone.

  The ‘Tech’, as it is known, in accordance with the local flair for abbreviation – the Tech, with its marble floors, its great stone staircase, and, from the topmost storey, its tremendous views out over the surviving remnants of the Georgian city, is the site of my next three years of education: a wrong decision for everyone concerned, myself and the college authorities; though it seemed at the time, and still seems in retrospect, a tremendously enjoyable interlude. I’m no longer reluctant to get out of bed in the mornings, nor do I have to grit my teeth before stepping on the bus which transports me down the Donegall Road, past the quaint Carnegie library near the railway line where all those delectable adventure stories were borrowed by me from the age of six on, along Great Victoria Street, which still contains the Great Northern Railway terminus, to alight near the famous landmark statue known as the Black Man.

  It’s a heartening short journey in all weathers: louring overcast mornings with the rain sweeping down in sheets from Divis Mountain, alluring sybaritic sunshine, the nip and chill of autumn. Best of all is the rare thick snowfall working its mysterious transformations – the closest ordinary weather can come to a storybook ambience, a setting rife with possibilities. Look sideways through a mass of swirling snowflakes, and you can nearly see the Little Match Girl bravely holding up a tiny flickering flame; or the jolly boys of Greyfriars, in scarves and overcoats, tramping through the wintry countryside towards some occasion of seasonal chicanery to which they will put a stop. You can think yourself back to an imaginary New England Christmas in Civil War days, in particularly glistening and festive form.

  But I’m getting too far away from the Black Man and its surroundings. The original occupier of the pedestal was the young Earl of Belfast (dead at twenty-five), cast in bronze but then for some reason painted black; this statue, the first in Belfast, was on its plinth by 1855, but twenty-odd years later it came down to make way for an effigy of the Revd Dr Henry Cooke, ‘the framer of sectarianism in the politics of Ulster’, as one unimpressed commentator put it. Cooke, every bit as black as he’s painted, still stands on the spot, appropriately positioned with his back turned to Inst and all its liberal traditions – and later to the even more permissive Art College – for ever gazing down Wellington Place in Presbyterian disdain for the unconverted. (Actually, though it’s still known as the Black Man, Cooke’s statue is plainly green, the green of verdigris.)

  For some of us, he might stand as a reminder of the pass to which we’re brought, partly as a consequence of the theological certainties he embodied: one version of them anyway. Anti-popery or Ultramontanism, you can take your pick. Cooke’s elevated position is appropriate in another sense. From boyhood, it seems – if we’re to credit a story told by his biographer – he was accustomed to raising himself (quite literally) above the ruck. Having mastered the stunt of walking on stilts, he would sometimes frighten the life out of the Georgian (George iv, that is) matrons of Maghera by striding, apparently on air, past their upper windows. Well, it was a suitable exercise in thaumaturgy for a future roaring divine.

  When I became an art student in 1960, the area around the Black Man was still dominated by Georgian terraces – not yet replaced by stretches of waste ground and brutal featureless constructions: old tall houses allowed to get damp and rickety, but nevertheless redolent of a defunct grandeur which is very piquant. The Kensington Hotel, or its successor, is still there in College Square East; and underneath it, on the ground floor, or in the same block, is a café (I seem to remember) where we take our morning coffee and discuss the dramas of the day. Further along, towards the gnr, is the house once inhabited by Robert MacAdam and his brother James; but my awareness, at the time, of the history of Irish-speaking in Belfast doesn’t extend to its Presbyterian initiators (in particular MacAdam, a counterpart of Cooke, if you like – though Cooke himself, it has to be said, understood the odd phrase in Irish and wasn’t opposed to the acquisition of the language among his co-religionists, if only for proselytising purposes. Right down to the present time, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland can count Irish-speakers among its ministers – just to confound all those for whom sectarianism signifies a monolithic consistency, and to act as a warning to all of us about making sectarian assumptions).

  That July, between school and art school, I’m back among the gorse and turf-fumes of Donegal, in a different Gaeltacht, Loughanure instead of Rannafast (Loch-an-Iubhair, the Lake of the Yew Tree), with different companions and different social expectations, Rannafast – for the moment – having deactivated my urge to misbehave. This is a more sedate sojourn than the previous year’s. No one comes knocking on our bedroom windows at midnight; no full-blown infatuations suggest to us the possibility of Catholic morals going by the board. Boisterousness and hilarity are kept to a minimum. True, we make friends with one or two of the boys-from-the-place and join them for the odd walk across heathery fields, but this is a very low-key affair, these are nondescript characters in comparison with the tearaways of Rannafast.

  This is as it should be. Part of my purpose in being here is to demonstrate (to myself as well as others) that the Donegal Gaeltacht is not out of bounds as far as I am concerned, whatever restrictions may prevail for the pupils of St Dominic’s High School. I’m divesting the Gaeltacht of its damaging associations. And Loughanure, untouched by scandal or mystique,
is attuned to this anodyne imperative. Later, there’d be other cut-off Gaeltachts in which to enact a quintessential Irishness and embrace the holiday spirit to the full – all the way down the west coast from Teelin to the Dingle Peninsula, places in which I’d come up against the all but impenetrable Gaelic of provinces other than Ulster.

  And Rannafast itself would be revisited in due course, and not only in the summer; there’d be frozen landscapes to revel in, happed-up excursions into the countryside with frost imposing a wintry frivolity on the austere townlands, moments of despair and fatigue on the Cloughaneelly road with an Arctic wind whipping hailstones into our faces as we totter along with suitcases trying to thumb a lift. Once, picked up in such circumstances by a kind-hearted couple, I’m surprised to be singled out as the chief object of commiseration: ‘Níl mórán aoise aicise,’ they exclaim: ‘She’s not very old,’ meaning, ‘Dear, dear, what is she doing out in this weather in the middle of nowhere when she should be at home tucked up in bed.’ To which I can only retort, ‘Oh – but – tá fiche bliain agam.’ (‘I’m twenty.’)

  I am twenty, and only a few months away from completing my Tech course (graphic design/illustration). I’ll be sorry to leave the predominantly zestful place: which, looking back on it, strikes me as constituting a kind of halfway house between the past and the future – my future, with all its troughs and fillips undreamt of by the nuns of St Dominic’s (though the one who predicted a future for me as a pavement artist, and never a nun, perhaps wasn’t too wide of the mark). The Tech embodies all the tentativeness, along with the ‘charmed circle’ aspect, of provincial student life. It is rooted in its locality in ways I don’t fully appreciate at the time. I’m not terribly familiar with its traditions, or indeed with the tradition of art in Belfast – though I’ve often been, with pleasure, to the Ulster Museum on the Stranmillis Road, where I’ve graduated from admiring Rosamund Praeger’s chubby sculptures of infants and elves to an appreciation of the jaunty street scenes of William Conor and the allegorical romanticism of John Luke. I have a lot to learn …

  I’m not aware, for example, of the Art College’s early connection with Inst, going back to 1849, when it opened in the North Wing of the famous Belfast boys’ school. It had a short existence there, in fact, since inadequate funding led to its closure in 1854. Then it reappeared in 1870 in the same place as a Government School of Art. Thirty-odd years later, it was shifted into temporary accommodation in Lower North Street, while the monumental College of Technology, its ultimate destination, was rising up in solid Portland stone to obliterate the harmonious aspect of Sir John Soane’s Inst … And there it stayed, on the top floor of the Tech, with its thirty mellow workrooms, for nearly sixty years, before its next removal to bleak new quarters – newly built – in York Street, where it still is.

  I’m thankful to have been among the last intake of Tech art students, with the whole top floor and its build-up of a uniquely creative atmosphere to relish. The importance of accretion in establishing a sense of purpose and integrity cannot be overstated. And even if, in our ignorance, we were hardly aware of so much as the names of former prominent students, we might have grasped at some level that the place was alive with the aura of these students and others who’d bequeathed to it something of their own dynamic approach to things.

  For myself – despite my general lack of knowledge at seventeen or eighteen, I do have a strong awareness of the art school as an inestimable agency of enlightenment. It stands four-square as a countervailing force to the philistinism and puritanism of the North. For me, as a place of learning, it’s enriching and bewitching – well, it could hardly be otherwise, after the withering atmosphere of Ballynahinch. It’s as if I’ve been let out into the clear air after long confinement in a coal cellar … I’m still on the edge, though, observing rather than participating. It will take the even more exorbitant excitements of 1960s London to get me fully into line with the more advanced mores of the day.

  There’s a lot to take in all at once, it seems to me: easels and paint-stained overalls, an aroma of clay and linseed oil, life-drawing from naked male models (well, almost naked), eccentric pipe-smoking lecturers wearing tweed jackets (including the wonderfully named Romeo Toogood), the enormous inspired canvases of top-notch students, incredibly glamorous and knowing third-years thronging the corridors between classes. The last, I feel, are as far beyond me in matters of style as I considered myself to be beyond the frumps of Ballynahinch. But I’m not above picking up a tip or two – for instance, plaiting a few strands of hair at each side of my face while the rest hangs loose; or wearing a pendant on a black velvet ribbon round my neck. And I’m beginning to be aware of the affirmative possibilities of opaque black stockings, under the influence of a new friend who wore them with a certain panache, long before it was fashionable, or even acceptable, to do so.

  This friend, Eunice McClelland, is actually a one-time classmate from St Dominic’s; on our first morning at the Tech, diffident newcomers, we latch on to one another with a surge of relief at spotting a familiar face amid a sea of unknowns, unknowns, moreover, with names like D’Arcy, Gregory and Cooper-Chadwick, which are clearly Protestant, and toffee-nosed Protestant at that. But that same morning we join forces with another new arrival, a confident ex-pupil of Belfast Royal Academy, and drop any tribal biases we might be harbouring. This is the place for disembarrassing yourself of sectarian presuppositions. Art-school friendships are not formed along religious lines, and this is a revelation to me. Not that Protestants, indeed, were ever an alien species as far as I was concerned, with half my first cousins, not to mention grandparents, uncles and aunts, being fully subscribing members of the Church of Ireland. But in the segregated circumstances of our upbringing, it was hard to have much sustained contact with the other lot (though some of us managed a little). They inhabited a parallel universe, with schools, churches and social activities all their own. It’s only at art school that an inspiriting integration becomes a normal mode of existence.

  Our tripartite alliance, formed on our first day as art students, lasts until the following summer, when one of us leaves to go in for nursing and another is held back to repeat her first year, while I – who shouldn’t – progress more or less smoothly through the course (and then compound the career error by embarking on a further three-year course at the Central School in London: all of which leaves me well, or at least extensively, trained in a subject which has no relevance to my subsequent professional life. But that’s another story.). My principal friend at the time, however, is still the redhead from Derby Street on the Falls Road, Maire Maguire, a fellow Irish-speaker and Gaeltacht enthusiast, who has left St Dominic’s without completing her A level course and taken a job in a bookshop called Ambrose Serridge in Castle Street. This is not far from the Tech and during a lot of my free time I rush around there to fill her in on the latest item of art school gossip and the current state of my own – generally multiple – infatuations.

  The immediate psychological effect of my expulsion from school was to reinforce an acceptance of Catholic morality. I am out to demonstrate to the fullest extent how mistaken the nuns of St Dominic’s were to convict me of unchastity. I go about grimly subscribing to the sixth and ninth commandments of the Catholic Church. I might, indeed, have taken a contrary position, deciding to have the libidinous game as well as the name; but, as yet, all those tremendous pressures, social, moral and nationalistic, are firmly keeping my libido in order, in common with most other people’s. As for the name (Ainm gan tábhacht, the name without the substance) – that was harder to discard than I’d realised. As recently as 1998 I was assured by a male Belfast contemporary that the real reason behind my ejection from St Dominic’s had to do with the prominence of my chest; and he added that the same chest had been something of an icon of local masturbators – a fact that may amuse me now, though I’d have been truly appalled at the time.

  Decent Catholic Ireland. I cannot be certain how far my upholding of t
his concept was taken seriously at the Assumption Convent, since the place already abounded in those who were, by nature, rather more sympathetic to it. (One girl was said to have taken a saw to the heels of her shoes, in order not to be thought a prey to vanity or worldliness.) Much of my idle talk between lessons has to do with boys, the Saturday night student hop at Queen’s University and the spiritual dangers divertingly evaded there, or embraced only partially.

  (Spiritual danger is a real bugbear for the Catholic clergy, far more than physical danger of any kind. It’s not that long since the Bishop of Derry, a Dr Farren, worried himself sick about teenagers frequenting irreligious dance halls where the standard of purity would fall far short of the Catholic ideal. He’s quoted in an Irish Times of 1951 posing a rhetorical question: could young people be expected to emerge from such halls ‘as good as they went into them’? His answer is a resounding no, but I don’t really think attendance at inter-denominational dances made much difference to anyone’s morals. Most people’s morals – in the Catholic sense – are either inflexibly in place by this stage in their lives, or potentially so corruptible that the point of recusancy will be reached sooner or later, even if they sit at home and embroider cushions. But it’s true that those who venture beyond their parish halls get the name of bad Catholics.)

  Contemplating the priggish element in the school drives me to scorn and bemusement, even though I believe my grasp on morality to be as tenacious as anyone’s. Half the Ballynahinch pupils look and act like convent-fodder: negators and renouncers to a man (or a girl). They, for their part, are disgusted by me and my quasi-erotic antics, which include fending off the advances of an Indian in a turban – very exotic for Belfast – and not coming to grief after accepting a lift from five strange boys in a car. (An extravagant imprudence, on the ‘fool’s luck’ principle, sees me through.)